Does It Matter That Waco DAs Charged 100+ Bikers In A 'Murder' That May Never Have Happened?
District Attorney Abel Reyna may not be able to get a grand jury to indict a ham sandwich, but he could probably get a grand jury to indict defendants for the murder of a ham sandwich.
District Attorney Abel Reyna may not be able to get a grand jury to indict a ham sandwich, but he could probably get a grand jury to indict defendants for the murder of a ham sandwich.
After all, that couldn’t be too much harder than what he’s actually just done. Reyna recently convinced a grand jury to indict numerous defendants in the death of a victim whose existence nobody seems able to confirm, whose murder probably never happened.
The McLennan County District Attorney’s Office, led by Abel Reyna, is prosecuting the nearly 200 men arrested at a shoot-out at a motorcycle club rally at the Twin Peaks restaurant in Waco, Texas. Since the May 17 incident, authorities have consistently reported that nine men died as a result of shots fired in the brawl. McLennan County released autopsy reports for nine victims. However, the recent grand jury indictments of the arrested bikers list ten men among the dead. (Houston defense attorney and blogger Mark Bennett has a copy of one of the true bills here .)
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On Friday, Reyna has released a statement saying that the whole mysterious mess is the result of a “clerical error.”
If so, it wouldn’t be the first error spotted. The indictment lists among the injured a “Cory Ledbetter,” though the man to whom prosecutors are referring is most likely defendant “Cody Ledbetter.”
In the case of “William Anderson,” the tenth homicide victim, though, nobody involved with the case seemed to even know who he was or if he even existed.
Waco Assistant Police Chief Ryan Hold and Sgt. W. Patrick Swanton told the Waco Tribune that they were unaware of more than nine bikers killed on May 17. Several bikers present at the Twin Peaks shooting or their attorneys have told the press that they too are unaware of anyone named William Anderson dying — or even being present at — the May incident.
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Who Is This Mysterious “Clerical Error”?
District Attorney Abel Reyna did not elaborate on how the tenth name found its way into the indictments. Reyna’s statement:
“The inclusion of the ’10th dead biker’ in some of the Twin Peaks indictments was a clerical error on our part that can and will be corrected at a later date closer to trial. The additional name has absolutely no effect on the charges or the viability of those indictments.
I regret this minor error has shifted focus away from the violent and dangerous crimes that occurred in the heart of our community on May 17, 2015.”
Reyna doesn’t specify exactly how the “error” will be changed. Will the DA’s Office remove all references to a tenth homicide victim, or will the DA’s Office correct the name of the victim? Note that Reyna does not say that there is not a tenth dead biker. Rather, he says that the inclusion was an error.
Even if the DA’s Office didn’t mean to include a tenth homicide victim, where did the name “William Anderson” come from?
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Many of the plausible explanations involve a man named Spaz.
James Kenneth “Spaz” Anderson was allegedly shot in the arm at the Twin Peaks restaurant on May 17, but managed to get away without being arrested. On September 3, Spaz died after his motorcycle collided with a deer on a highway in Nebraska.
The McLennan County DA’s Office received a search warrant to remove the bullet from Spaz Anderson’s arm after his death, presumably in order to confirm that the bullet came from a gun fired at the Twin Peaks shoot-out.
“James Anderson,” aka Spaz, is listed in the indictment as one of the assault victims. Spaz’s long-deceased father was named William, incidentally. Perhaps prosecutors debated whether to include Spaz in the indictment as a homicide victim, but decided against it. Maybe the clerical error was a failure to update an earlier draft of the indictment.
Of course, it’s possible too that prosecutors could try to amend the indictments later, changing “William Anderson” to “James Anderson.”
But that’s a tough row to hoe. Abandoning one of many victims in an indictment is much easier than amending an indictment to change the identity of a victim. Unless the defect is, for example, a slightly misspelled name or names that sound similar, courts usually won’t allow prosecutors’ amendments to change the names of victims.
Why Might Prosecutors Want To List Spaz As A Death In the Indictments, Even Though He Didn’t Die In Waco?
If Waco prosecutors wanted to convict one of the bikers of the murder of Spaz Anderson, they would have a hell of a time proving the causal link between the actions of any bikers present at the Twin Peaks shooting on May 17 and Spaz’s death by deer four months later.
But the causation problem would not prevent DAs from prosecuting lots of people for conspiracy to commit murder where Spaz is the victim.
As it turns out, the defendants in the Twin Peaks incident have been charged with engaging in organized criminal activity, which amounts to a conspiracy offense committed by members of criminal gangs.
To be guilty of conspiracy to commit murder, a person must enter into an agreement with others to commit murder, and one of the parties to the agreement must commit at least one overt act toward accomplishing that goal. The conspiracy charge does not depend on the murder actually being completed.
The bullet extracted from Spaz’s arm could go a long way in showing that someone shot him at the Twin Peaks rally, which prosecutors could argue is an overt act pursuant to the biker-gang conspiracy. That could be significant in the cases against lots of other bikers.
‘Clerical Errors’ Are No Big Deal, Right? Right?
Speculation about explanations aside, does any of this truly matter?
After all, who hasn’t blundered in a document at some point? Maybe hit “send” before you meant to? Maybe accidentally misspelled your kid’s name in the family Christmas card you sent out?
Pretty embarrassing, huh?
Maybe that’s how Abel Reyna feels after his “clerical error.”
Except he should feel more like you would if you knew ahead of time that national media and civil rights advocates would be scrutinizing every jot of your Christmas cards . . . and the liberty of men innocent until proven guilty depended upon the accuracy of your work . . . and your friends and family are grand jurors . . . and your kid was a homicide victim.
And you don’t actually have a kid.
So, maybe “embarrassing” isn’t the right word, after all.
“Shameful” is probably more accurate.
It’s shameful that prosecutors would be hasty while handling a case of this magnitude. If you’re going to use the same fill-in-the-blank charging instrument for each of the 100+ bikers indicted so far — as McLennan County has — the least you could do is proofread.
Tamara Tabo is a summa cum laude graduate of the Thurgood Marshall School of Law at Texas Southern University, where she served as Editor-in-Chief of the school’s law review. After graduation, she has clerked on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit and ran the Center for Legal Pedagogy at Texas Southern University, an institute applying cognitive science to improvements in legal education. You can reach her at tabo.atl@gmail.com.
